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imo falling back on those kinds of code challenges indicate a lack of imagination and creativity on the part of the hiring personnel. the industry has grown so
by andrew_ 4y ago
imo falling back on those kinds of code challenges indicate a lack of imagination and creativity on the part of the hiring personnel. the industry has grown so much and there are so many new tools available, people work in so many new and creative ways, that there's no reason to use methods that predate when most candidates these days were born.
- josephg 4y agoI don’t agree at all. If it’s so cut and dry for you, what other forms of assessment would you recommend instead? I think technical assessment needs to assess lots of skills, but obviously one of the skills to test is how good someone is at programming. There’s a few ways to do that - my personal favourite is to have a few hundred lines of buggy code with failing tests and ask the candidate to debug it for you. But from the data I’ve seen, asking someone to code something from scratch also provides a lot of signal even if you also get them to debug something. (If you were going to pick one test, coding from scratch is a better assessment for juniors and debugging is better to assess seniors). But I think some form of practical programming assessment is necessary. You won’t learn if someone can program well by talking to them. And take home programming tasks are too easily gamed. I do think you should make the programming challenge relevant to the job though. If you’re hiring a frontend dev, get them to make a webpage. A backend dev? Get them to make a set of rest endpoints wrapping a simple database. Algorithm challenges make sense for systems programming, or when you’re hiring generalists at FAANG and such. (Source: I’ve interviewed over 400 people and worked with data scientists who looked at the per question results.)